Atin took the hint and didn't ask about Grievous again. He kept watch, DC-17 rifle ready, anxious not to use it for once. It was odd to be invisible. He wondered why the Grand Army didn't use stealth coating on all trooper armour, seeing as most of their land engagements were against droids.

There was a lot that didn't add up in this war.

“There,” said Prudii, closing the panel gently. He stood back to inspect it. “We were never here.”

They climbed back up to the gantry on their lines and slipped out the way they'd come. It was pitch black outside. They had an hour to get to the extraction point and transmit their coordinates to the heavily , disguised freighter waiting for them. On Olanet, that meant crossing '. kilometres of marshaling yards serving the nerf-meat industry. Atin ;' % could hear the animals lowing, but he'd still never seen a live nerf.

“This place stinks.” Prudii settled behind a repulsor truck in a yard full of hundreds of others and squatted in its shadow. The harmless but nauseating stench of manure and animals penetrated his helmet's filters. “Five-seven, are you receiving?”

“With you in 10, sir. Stand by.”

Prudii made no comment about the 'sir.' He took the data wafers out of his belt and attached a probe to them, one at a time. He struck Atin as a kindred spirit, a man who wouldn't let any inanimate objects get the better of him, but he was still hard work.

“Shab,” Prudii muttered. He held but a wafer. “What do you make of this?”

Atin slotted it into his own wafer reader and relayed the extracted data to his HUD. The readout was just strings of numbers, the kind of data he'd need to analyze carefully. “What am I looking at? I normally blow this stuff up. I've never stopped to read it.”

“Look for the code that starts zero-zero-five-alpha, 10 from the top row.”

“Got it.”

“That's the running total of units off the line since the wafer was inserted to start the production run. And the date.”

Atin scanned from left to right, counting the line of numbers and inserting imaginary commas. “996,125. In a year.”

“Correct.”

“Not exactly smoking.” Atin checked that he wasn't missing a row of numbers. “No, just six figures.”

“Every factory we hit is producing numbers like that. Judging by the raw material freight we monitor, there're still a lot more factories out there, but I think we're talking about a few hundred million droids.”

“That's reassuring. Thanks. I'll sleep well tonight.”

“And so you should, ner vod.” Prudii popped the seal on his collar, lifted off his helmet and wiped the palm of his gauntlet across his forehead; it came away shiny with sweat in the faint light leaking from the HUD. Somehow he looked older than Mereel and Ordo. “They say they're making quadrillions of droids.” He paused. “A quadrillion has 15 zeroes. A thousand million millions, not a few hundred. Are we missing something here?”

Atin took no offence at the explanation. Anything more than three million was bad news in his book; that was how many clone troops were deployed or being raised on Kamino. “'They' say? Who're 'they'?”

“Now that's a good question.”

“Anyway, it only takes one to kill you.”

“But where are they all? I've bimbled around 47 planets this last year.” Prudii made it sound like sightseeing. Atin had a sudden vision of him admiring the visitor attractions of Sep planets and then fragmenting them. The grip of the Verpine rifle slung across his back was well-worn. Atin had no real idea who Prudii hunted, and he was happier that way. “Seen a lot, counted a lot. But not quadrillions. They just don't seem to be able to produce anywhere near those numbers.”

“But that's why we're fighting, isn't it?” Atin tried not to worry about the HoloNet news and took the political debate as something that didn't matter, because one droid or a septillion, he and his brothers were the ones who would still be in the front line. “Because the Seps are going to overrun us with droid armies if we don't stop them. So why not just reassure the public that the threat isn't that big?”

Prudii looked at him for a moment. Atin got the feeling that he felt sorry for him in some way, and he wasn't sure why. “Because it's only the likes of us that are finding this out every time we crack a Sep facility.”

“You report it?”

“Of course I report it. Every time. To General Zey. Mace Windu knows. They all know.”

“So why is the holonews news saying quadrillions? Where did the figure come from?”

“I heard it first from Republic Intelligence.”

“Well, then…” Intel was notoriously variable in quality. “They make it up as they go along.”

“Even they're not that stupid.”

Prudii replaced his helmet and held his hand out to Atin for the wafer. He didn't say much after that.

Millions or quadrillions. So what? Atin, a man who enjoyed numbers, looked at the 1.2 million clone troopers deployed at that moment, added the two million men still being raised and trained, and didn't even need to place a decimal point to work out that he didn't like the odds.

But he never did. And it never stopped him from defying them.

“Want me to relay this data to HQ?” he asked.

“No,” said Prudii. “Not until Kal'buir sees it. Never until he sees it.”

A good Mandalorian son always obeyed his father. The Null ARCs were no different: they looked to Sergeant Kal Skirata – Kal'buir, Papa Kal – for their orders, not to the Republic. A Mando father put his sons first, after all, and they trusted him.

Skirata would always outrank everyone – captain, general-and even Supreme Chancellor.

place and time: tipoca city. kamino – 461 days after the battle of geonosis.

Ko Sai was a devious piece of work.

Mereel – ARC trooper N-7 – had always thought of Kaminoans as cold, arrogant, xenophobic, and even suitable for barbecuing, but he'd never seen them as scheming – not until he began hunting their missing chief scientist, anyway. She hadn't died in the Battle of Kamino, as everyone thought. She'd defected.

Why? What motivates her? Wealth? Not politics, that's for sure.

He knew she was still alive, because she was on the run from her Separatist paymasters, now. In the cantinas of Tatooine, he'd heard rumours of a bounty. And when you had only your rare skill in cloning to trade, in a galaxy where non-military cloning was now banned, your attempts to raise credits were hard to hide from those who knew where to look.

The world of Khomm and Arkania had really suffered from that ban. Mereel knew exactly where to look.

He stood to attention in the ranks of troopers in theTipoca training facility, a good, obedient clone as far as the Kaminoans were concerned. A perfect product. But their identification systems weren't quite as foolproof as they'd told the Republic. They certainly hadn't spotted his fake ID transponder code. The little chip cycled through randomly generated IDs and, without his distinctive kama and blue-trimmed armour, he could disappear right in front of the kaminiise. Not even the patrolling KE-8 pilots looking for defective clones could spot him.

You think you're infallible, don't you, aiwha-bait?

One of the Kaminoan technicians walked along the row of troopers and paused in front of him, blinking, gray-skinned, its long fragile neck tempting to a man trained to kill. Mereel, frozen at attention, fantasized: blaster, vibroblade or garrote? These vile things had wanted to exterminate him as a kid, and he would never forget that. He and his five brothers had been a cloning experiment the Kaminoans considered a failure: but Kal Skirata had saved them.

There was time for revenge later. Kal'buir had taught him patience.

Patience is a luxury. I'm ageing twice as fast as an ordinary man.